a musical list

[calimac]

A post on Swedish and Finnish food over at athenais's mutated in comments (my fault) into attempts to list Scandinavian and Nordic composers, and inspired me to dig into my recordings database and see how many composers from different countries I have music by.

My definition of country is a bit ad-hoc (I list all the British nations separately), and I tend to class composers by where they spent their adult careers rather than, as most music encyclopedias do, by their land of nativity, but here's the list, with a few of my particular favorites from the more popular countries:

284: U.S. (Copland, Cowell, Hovhaness, Glass)
187: England (Vaughan Williams, Arnold, Sullivan)
133: Italy (Vivaldi, Respighi – no, I don’t like Italian opera much; why do you ask?)
127: France (Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Poulenc)
96: Germany (Bach, Schumann, Mendelssohn)
68: Austria (the king of musical countries: Haydn [the guy in my icon], Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Bruckner)
53: Russia (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky)
36: Czech Republic (Dvorak, Janacek, Martinu)
33: Spain (Boccherini, Scarlatti: yes, I know they were born in Italy, but they lived & wrote in Spain)
24: Belgium (Susato)
21: Sweden (Atterberg, Berwald)
19: Denmark (Nielsen, Gade), Netherlands (Dopper)
17: Finland (Sibelius, Sallinen)
14: Canada, Hungary, Japan, Scotland
12: Poland
11: Israel
8: Australia
7: African countries (total), Ireland, Norway
6: Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland
5: Argentina, Estonia, Wales
4: China, Greece
3: Georgia, Latvia, Ukraine
2: Armenia, Iceland, Lithuania, Romania
1: Belarus, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Korea, Luxembourg, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia